But by focusing too much on these anecdotal aspects, are we not missing the spiritual depth of his testimony?

The core of Carlo Acutis' message is not inherently juvenile: it is his radical love for the Eucharist, which he called the "highway to heaven."

His practice of attending daily Mass as a transformative encounter with Christ, his ability to blend contemplation with action, prayer with engagement in the digital world—all this speaks to every baptised person, regardless of age or era.

A saint's unique characteristic is their ability to speak to all people at all times.

A projection by adults

The church's tendency to promote "Peter Pan saints"—idealised youthful figures who died before facing the complexities of adulthood—is not new.

Before Carlo Acutis, there were Sts Dominic Savio and Maria Goretti. These figures reveal an ecclesial fascination with an eternal, fantasised youth.

This promotion of devotion to Blessed Carlo comes more from adults (parents, youth ministers, priests) than from young people themselves.

While it claims to resonate with today's young Christians, what is often highlighted is the fantasy of a perfect youth: a well-behaved teenager without rebellion or crises.

Ultimately, Carlo becomes less the patron saint of teenagers and more the patron of what adults wish their teenagers would be.

An inhibiting idealisation

Such idealization can have a discouraging effect on young Catholics.

How can they not feel overwhelmed by these models of early perfection?

The "freshness" and "spontaneity" of adolescent faith are valuable but cannot be the sole spiritual horizon offered to youth.

Christian maturity also involves navigating deserts, persevering over time, and deepening faith through trials. Models of holiness for young people must allow them to envision spiritual growth that extends into adulthood, strengthening their resolve to mature and fulfil their faith.

By emphasizing mimicry—"someone like you"—we risk neglecting the truly inspirational dimension of sainthood. Saints should reveal what we aspire to be, not merely reflect what we already are.

Moreover, by confining Acutis to the role of "saint for the young," the church risks diminishing the universal scope of his testimony.

His way of living the Eucharistic mystery can move an adult as much as a teenager, and his approach to evangelisation through digital tools can inspire a senior as much as a young person.

While age-based segmentation serves understandable pastoral concerns, it ultimately impoverishes the Gospel message.

This also reflects the church's hesitation to allow a genuinely youthful voice that speaks to everyone.

This challenge surfaced in the recent Synod, where many young people felt ignored.

Yes, a 16-year-old in sneakers can teach the whole church about love for the Eucharist, missionary zeal, and service to the poor.

Yes, young people have a rightful place in the church's structure and governance, serving everyone.

The true modernity of Carlo Acutis

Blessed Carlo Acutis undoubtedly deserves canonisation.

But we must stop reducing him to a teenage icon that obscures his core message: his radical Eucharistic witness, which transcends age categories. And we must have the pastoral courage to present young people with a broader array of models of holiness, including figures who navigated the complexities of adult life while remaining faithful to the Gospel ideal.

The true modernity of Carlo Acutis lies not in his sneakers or gaming console but in his ability to make the heart of the Christian faith accessible and desirable.

In this, he is a true saint: one for our time and for all times.

• Clément Barré is a Catholic priest from the Archdiocese of Bordeaux in southwestern France, and a team member of Enfance Adolescence, the diocesan Service for Children and Youth Ministry that aims to foster encounters with Christ, the church, and others among children and adolescents.
• First Published in La Croix International. Republished with permission.

We acknowledge and revere those not named in the church's canonical roster of saints, men and women who nonetheless constitute what St John the Seer called:

• a great multitude,
• which no one could count,
• from every nation, race, people, and tongue (Rev 7:9).

We have known them, and we know that they are now with Christ and all his saints, which is how we define heaven.

Hence the question, how do we know that? What does holiness look like?

The word "holy" hints at the otherness of God.

It comes from the Proto-Germanic word hailagaz, meaning "whole" or "uninjured."

We speak of God as holy because we experience ourselves as internally divided and cut off from something essential.

Hence God is that which is undivided and vital, something whole and complete within itself.

If you have followed all of that, you can see the challenge in describing holiness.

We are saying that some people, folks we have known, have a Godly quality. But what would that quality be, what does it look like, when we have no direct knowledge of God?

We are essentially saying that we have experienced these people as undivided, whole and uninjured.

The great existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard defined the saint as the person who wills the one thing.

Father in heaven! What is a man without Thee!

What is all that he knows, vast accumulation though it be, but a chipped fragment if he does not know Thee!

What is all his striving, could it even encompass a world, but a half-finished work if he does not know Thee: Thee the One, who art one thing and who art all!

So may Thou give to the intellect, wisdom to comprehend that one thing; to the heart, sincerity to receive this understanding; to the will, purity that wills only one thing.

In prosperity may Thou grant perseverance to will one thing; amid distractions, collectedness to will one thing; in suffering, patience to will one thing.

Oh, Thou that giveth both the beginning and the completion, may Thou early, at the dawn of day, give to the young man the resolution to will one thing.

As the day wanes, may Thou give to the old man a renewed remembrance of his first resolution, that the first may be like the last, the last like the first, in possession of a life that has willed only one thing.

(Introduction to Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing)

What you recognise in your grandmother, uncle, and beloved and departed friends is something of the wholeness, the undividedness of God. In a melting world, they were solid.

To borrow from Hamlet, they also suffered "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," yet they recollected themselves and recovered.

They remained whole, the most sterling of qualities, one that only shows itself when you contrast it with its opposite. They did not fall apart.

The world and its history never noticed these men and women. Continue reading

• Terrance W. Klein is a priest of the Diocese of Dodge City and author of Vanity Faith.

Among other things, I studied the works of Roman Catholic mystics.

One sublime idea they sometimes express is that each of us — indeed, God's whole creation — is one with the Maker of everything.

God is everywhere and everything

If I understand the idea correctly — and since I'm an autodidact on the subject, who knows? — they mean there is no separating any of us from God, or from each other or, for that matter, from the beasts and the mountains and the air.

We're all within God. God's within us. The Spirit who animates all beings animates us. There's no place we can go where God isn't present in all his glory.

This idea goes all the way back to the Bible, I believe. St. Paul once described Christ as "the everything in everything."

He also declared to the pagan philosophers on Mars Hill that "in God we live and move and exist." For my purposes here, the emphasis is on the "in."

Anyway, various mystics, monks and contemplatives I read have visited this profound concept, each giving it his or her own spin.

"But when we act in grace, our actions are not ours alone, they belong to God," Thomas Merton writes in "Thoughts in Solitude."

"For his actions in us reveal his being in us. The whole of life is to spiritualize our activities by humility and faith, to silence our (baser) nature by charity."

"God loves things by becoming them," Richard Rohr says in "The Universal Christ." "God loves things by uniting with them, not by excluding them."

If you're of a certain spiritual bent, and I am, you can take such ideas and go many directions with them, most of those directions helpful or at least eye-opening.

However, the way I want to point out here is this.

The sanctified and the mundane

Some mystics maintain that when we start to see the divine God living and working through us always, in all places, through all tasks, we begin to lose our distinction between what's holy and what's carnal, between what's sanctified and what's mundane — between what's mere toil and what's worship.

These seers maintain it all becomes holy. It all becomes a form of worship. God is unfailingly present. God has a purpose in it all. God is using it to his own ends.

For instance, as a preacher I might find myself running late as I rush to church to deliver my sermon on Christianity's most important day, Easter, to the biggest crowd I'll see all year. And let's say that on the way I get a flat tyre, too.

I would find this disconcerting. I'd be thinking: I've got to figure out how to assemble my jack — quickly. I'm going to get my bright Easter clothes grubby from this dirty tyre.

I might even miss the whole service. I'm going to disappoint my parishioners and their guests. What a disaster!

My blood pressure would rise by 20 points. Then 40.

You see, my instinct is to think of preaching an Easter sermon as a holy act — and changing a tyre as decidedly unholy. In this case, the latter would have sabotaged the former.

But on their insightful days, at least, the mystics might regard the scene differently.

If the ghost of Merton were to come floating out of the woods to watch me struggle with the spare tyre, he might say softly, "Peace, Reverend.

"This moment is as holy as preaching an Easter sermon. The resurrection is right here, right now. Relax, God will see to your congregation.

"You just tighten those lug nuts. Take your time. Breathe the Spirit in deeply.

"God's abiding in you, guiding your hands. Regard for a second the wonder of the knuckles and creases on those hands. Try to count the pores of your skin — you can't, because they're countless.

"Hear the birds singing in the trees above you. Feel the power of the creation itself pulsating along the shoulder of this country highway. It's aglow with the glory of the Lord."

At which point I'd cuss the ghost and tell him to mind his own flipping business, that I had somewhere important to be and if he wasn't going to help, he should get back to his hermitage.

(Just a little ministerial humor! I wouldn't really cuss Merton's ghost!)

Understanding holiness

Seriously, the mystics seem to possess an alternative — and I believe healthier — way of understanding holiness, God, work, life itself.

To them, any act becomes holy, and wholly rewarding, once we discern God's presence in it.

Weeding your flower bed is of the same cloth as sitting for tea with the Pope. Changing a baby's diaper is as spiritual as delivering Communion.

The monks who pray in a monastery and make cheese to support it find the cheesemaking as revelatory as the prayers.

It's all God, everywhere, at all times, for all of us. Whatever we're doing, once we've recognized God there, and God in us, that becomes enough.

• First published by Religion Unplugged
• Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years and is a journalist

I count three Italians, one Spaniard, one Pole and one Canadian. No doubt every single one was a person of great faith. Indeed, one was martyred "in hatred of the faith."

What strikes me, though, is that every single one of these five Servants of God and one Blessed comes from the northern hemisphere, the Global North.

In fact, Servant of God Sebastian Gil Vilves is the one who comes from the furthest south, i.e. Palma de Mallorca in Spain, which lies at 39.6°N latitude, nearly halfway from the Equator to the North Pole!

Good news, however!

In December 2023, Pope Francis promulgated seven decrees concerning nine people of whom four were from the Global South, one from Guatemala and three from DR Congo.

But the three from the Congo were all missionary priests from France and Italy.

Moreover, five out of the nine were Italian!

Well, I don't doubt that Italy is full of saints and that so is the Global North as a whole!

And no doubt it's also true that, given that many churches of the Global South are still of fairly recent origin, it's going to take time for causes from those often poor regions to make their way through the processes for beatification and canonisation.

Still, in a synodal Church that professes to be "walking with the people" and "opting for the poor," surely it's time for the Holy See to make these processes more accessible to people from the Global South?

Pope Francis has often championed popular religiosity.

If saints exist not for themselves but for the rest of us, then a synodal Church needs more recognised saints from the Global South!

• Stefan Gigacz is an honorary postdoctoral associate at Yarra Theological Union and the University of Divinity as well as the secretary of the Australian Cardijn Institute.
• First published at Synodal Reflections. Republished with permission.

The reason for the massive outdoor gathering was the pope's official proclamation of 10 new saints. It was the Catholic Church's first canonisation ceremony in over two years. Two thousand priests concelebrated the event with the Holy Father.

Rather than speaking solely of the newly canonised saints' lives and legacies during his homily at the celebratory Mass, Francis also offered advice on how to follow the path of holiness.

"Our fellow travellers who are canonised today lived their holiness by embracing with enthusiasm their vocation," he said.

He encouraged those present to follow the example of those who, in their time, were "brilliant reflections of the Lord of history".

It is not a matter of implementing a form of "personal heroics", Francis explained.

Rather, it's about following one's own vocation.

This vocation is to love, Francis said.

"For amid the darkness and tempests of life, that is the most important thing of all: God loves us."

Holiness is accessible to all of us, not just the superhuman, he said.

"Holiness does not consist of a few heroic gestures, but of many small acts of daily love."

The pope painted a picture of what he likes to call the everyday holiness of the "saints next door".

He also corrected what he described as a false image of holiness, with some advice about what's needed to achieve that state.

"At times, by over-emphasising our efforts to do good works, we have created an ideal of holiness excessively based on ourselves, our personal heroics… our readiness for self-sacrifice to achieve a reward," he said.

"We have turned holiness into an unattainable goal.

"We have separated it from everyday life, instead of looking for it and embracing it in our daily routines, in the dust of the streets, in the trials of real life and, in the words of Teresa of Avila to her Sisters, 'among the pots and pans'."

We are called "to serve, that is, not to put our own interests first: to clear our systems of the poison of greed and competitiveness; to fight the cancer of indifference and the worm of self-referentiality.

"Specifically, we should ask ourselves 'What do I do for others?' in order to go about our daily lives in a spirit of service, with unassuming love and without seeking any recompense".

Francis also addressed the political leaders present at the Mass, alluding to the geopolitical situation that Europe is currently experiencing.

Once again, he drew on the image of those he had just proclaimed new saints.

"While... tensions and wars increase, may the new saints inspire solutions of togetherness and ways of dialogue, especially in the hearts and minds of those who hold positions of great responsibility and are called upon to be agents of peace, not war," he said.

Source

• La Croix
• Image: Stuff

Catholics often know more about their neighbour's business than they do about the normal spiritual struggles going on in their own hearts and souls, Francis said during his sermon at early morning Mass last Friday.

He pointed out that life involves a continuing battle "between grace and sin, between the Lord who wants to save us and pull us out of temptation and the evil spirit who always pulls us down,".

If we want to live a holier life, Christians need to pay attention to that struggle.

This doesn't involve wandering through life "without noticing what's happening," he explained.

"So often we Christians are busy with so many things, including good ones, but what is going on inside you?"

Pointing out spiritual life "is a struggle between good and evil, but it's not an abstract good and an abstract evil," he explained:

"It's between the good that the Holy Spirit inspires us to do and the bad that the evil spirit inspires us to do. It's a struggle, a struggle we all have.

"If one of us were to say, ‘But I don't feel this, I'm blessed, I live calmly, in peace,'" he said he would respond, "You are not blessed. You are someone anesthetized, who doesn't understand what is happening."

Francis said sometimes is saeems as if we "know what is happening in our neighbourhood, what's going on in the next-door neighbour's house, but we don't know what's going on inside us."

The best remedy for this is to take "two or three minutes" at the end of each day to reflect on its happenings.

"What important thing happened inside me today? Oh yes, I had a bit of hatred here and I spoke badly of this person; I did this work of charity," and so on.

"The next question is, 'Who helped you do these things, both the bad and the good?" he suggested.

It's important and necessary to ask ourselves these questions "to know what is going on inside us," Francis explained.

Source

• Crux Now
• Image: Crux Now

Pope Francis quotes this judgment approvingly in Gaudete et exsultate, his apostolic exhortation "on the call to holiness in today's world."

He also quotes a less dramatic formulation of the same idea in Lumen gentium, the Second Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution on the Church: "all the faithful, whatever their condition or state, are called by the Lord—each in his or her own way—to that perfect holiness by which the Father himself is perfect."

However one puts it, this is an idea that makes many of us deeply uncomfortable.

We like our saints to be exceptions, the more exotic the better: an elderly Albanian woman in a sari, a wooden statue of a martyr carrying his head in his hand, a thirteenth-century Italian talking to the birds and rolling in the snow to stave off lust.

We are not like that, thank goodness.

We are just ordinary human beings, with ordinary human appetites and shortcomings. We aren't trying to be holy; we're just doing our best.

Or, if not quite our best, then as much as can reasonably be expected.

Holiness should neither scare nor bore us

When we say, "I'm no saint," it's almost never an admission of failure, but instead an insistence on our full humanity, as if saints were somehow either more or less than fully human—eunuchs, maybe, or angels.

This is, according to Francis, both a failure of imagination and a failure of nerve.

Near the beginning of Gaudete et exsultate he writes, "do not be afraid of holiness. It will take away none of your energy, vitality or joy.

"On the contrary, you will become what the Father had in mind when he created you, and you will be faithful to your deepest self."

And near the end of the exhortation, he makes the point again: "[God] does not want to enter our lives to cripple or diminish them, but to bring them to fulfillment."

If all Christians are called to be saints, no two are called to be saints in quite the same way.

Developing another teaching of the Second Vatican Council, Francis insists, again and again, on the variety of holiness. Continue reading

• Image: Commonweal

Women are usually in the background of papal statements, if they appear at all.

Not here.

They are upfront and visible.

Right at the outset (para 3), Francis brings up the witness of Sarah (along with Abraham), and calls attention to the role of our own mothers and grandmothers as holy witnesses who have shaped our faith.

He continues to name outstanding women believers within the exhortation. These include

• Maria Gabriella Sagheddu (para 5),
• Josephine Bakhita (para 32),
• Theresa of Calcutta (para 100),
• the martyred seven sisters of the monastery of the Visitation in Madrid (para 141),
• Scholastica (para 142),
• Monica (para 142), and, of course,
• Mary, the mother of Jesus (paras 124 and 176).

It's traditional that papal statements end with an appeal to Mary, but here she also appears within the document, as an exemplar of joy (para 124).

Francis makes particular mention of the "genius of woman" in para 12, drawing attention to how the Holy Spirit has worked through women saints like Hildegard of Bingen, Bridget of Sweden, Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, and Thérèse of Lisieux, whose witness emerged at crucial times in history.

These saints "produced new spiritual vigor and important reforms in the Church," Francis says.

Yet he also credits "unknown or forgotten women who, each in her own way, sustained and transformed families and communities by the power of their witness" (para 12).

Francis cites women writers frequently and at length.

Indeed, the one paradigmatic example Francis gives of holiness in everyday life is a woman (para 16).

He describes how she faces four different moments of decision in her day, and every time opts for charity, justice, compassion, and faithfulness—each of these moments, as he describes it, is a "step" toward holiness.

He also speaks affirmatively of the holiness of men and women who work hard to support their families: literally to "bring home the bread" (para 7).

This papal acknowledgment of women as economic actors is striking. Continue reading

• Image: Commonweal

"One size fits all" is simply not the way humanity works.

We're all quite different, whether it's the length of our arms and the girth of our waists or the extravertedness of our temperament and the sensitivity of our emotions.

We will all follow different paths, while living different vocations, to the same goal: holiness.

Thankfully, we have plenty of indications that this goal is possible despite our differences.

When the Church canonizes someone, She is reminding us that our vocation to holiness is within reach for us, thanks to the grace of God.

In all my conversations and experiences, even around the so-called Bible Belt, I don't often run across non-Catholics who really have a problem with the saints.

They may have concerns about praying to them, but those concerns are usually answered when they see that prayer does not equal worship.

Over all, everyone can relate to the importance of honoring those who have gone before us.

We do it in secular society, when we hold up heroes who have championed causes close to our hearts.

In November last year, the Church held up Father Solanus Casey as a reminder to all of us that holiness is possible.

He is the second American priest to be beatified in 2017, following the beatification of Father Stanley Rother in September.

When you look at the lives of Father Solanus and Father Rother, you see that when it comes to holiness, we don't believe one size fits all.

These two men may have lived the same vocation—priesthood—but that path took them in very different directions. Continue reading

• Joan Watson was born and raised in Lafayette, Indiana, but college and graduate school took her to Virginia, Ohio, and Rome. After graduating from Christendom College with a B.A. in History and Franciscan University with a M.A. in Theology, she moved to Nashville, Tennessee to be part of the explosion of Catholic culture in the middle of the Bible Belt.

"One size fits all" is simply not the way humanity works.

We're all quite different, whether it's the length of our arms and the girth of our waists or the extravertedness of our temperament and the sensitivity of our emotions.

We will all follow different paths, while living different vocations, to the same goal: holiness.

Thankfully, we have plenty of indications that this goal is possible despite our differences.

When the Church canonizes someone, She is reminding us that our vocation to holiness is within reach for us, thanks to the grace of God.

In all my conversations and experiences, even around the so-called Bible Belt, I don't often run across non-Catholics who really have a problem with the saints.

They may have concerns about praying to them, but those concerns are usually answered when they see that prayer does not equal worship.

Over all, everyone can relate to the importance of honoring those who have gone before us. We do it in secular society, when we hold up heroes who have championed causes close to our hearts.

This weekend, the Church will hold up Father Solanus Casey as a reminder to all of us that holiness is possible.

He is the second American priest to be beatified this year, following the beatification of Father Stanley Rother in September.

When you look at the lives of Father Solanus and Father Rother, you see that when it comes to holiness, we don't believe one size fits all.

These two men may have lived the same vocation—priesthood—but that path took them in very different directions.

Both struggled in the seminary, with Father Solanus eventually being ordained as a simplex priest, a priest who could celebrate Mass but not hear confessions or preach formal doctrinal homilies.

He humbly served the poor and sick in New York and Detroit, bringing consolation to those who sometimes simply needed someone to listen and love them. Continue reading

Sources

• Integrated Catholic Life article by Joan Watson, the Director of Adult Formation for the Diocese of Nashville.
• Image: DailyMom.com

Scrupulosity is one of those pesky spiritual problems that we don't always recognize but can give us a lot a grief if left unchecked. Believe me, I know!

Never heard of scrupulosity? How about Catholic Guilt? Scrupulosity is Catholic Guilt run amok, or, as St. Alphonsus Liguori explains:

"A conscience is scrupulous when, for a frivolous reason and without rational basis, there is a frequent fear of sin even though in reality there is no sin at all. A scruple is a defective understanding of something" (Moral Theology, Alphonsus de Liguori: Selected Writings, ed. Frederick M. Jones, C. Ss. R., pg. 322).

When you obsess over whether or not something was done "right," you may be scrupulous.

When a cloud of anxiety and doubt hovers over the minutiae your faith and moral life, you may be scrupulous.

When you fear obsessive thoughts and feelings and use prayer and the Sacraments compulsively in order to get rid of them, you may be scrupulous.

St. Ignatius' advice for dealing with scruples might surprise the person experiencing them. In a world of excess, greed, and violence, where heinous sin is broadcast publicly and without shame, one might think we Christians need to practice more prayer and penance in order to be effective witnesses of God's saving grace. I couldn't agree more.

But for the scrupulous person, asceticism is exactly the wrong approach to living a joyful life with Jesus Christ, St. Ignatius says. His advice points the scrupulous person—and their directors—toward a different solution.

Moderation as the Key to Sanctity

St. Ignatius of Loyola points out that in their spiritual and moral lives, people tend toward being lax in their faith or being scrupulous, that we have a natural inclination in one way or the other. Continue reading

Sources

• Article by Rhonda Ortiz, who is a Catholic convert, a wife and mother, in The Integrated Catholic Life
• Image: The Integrated Catholic Life

I moan and groan, yell at my kids, live half my life by the motto "Me First," mistrust God and generally schlep along the Road to Zion when I could be enjoying a brisk walk.

I am, in short, a poor specimen of the new creation.

Why then, should you bother reading any further? There's only one reason: you are in pretty much the same boat too. Continue reading

The demand for being perfect, based on Matthew 5:14, "Be ye therefore perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect," became the deranged and deranging discipline that was brought to an end by Vatican II's healthier attitude toward spiritual growth.

One of the great, largely unseen and surely unsung tragedies of the old church to which Pope Benedict XVI's "Reform of the Reform" triumphantly proposes to return us was that of good-hearted and willing young men and women sacrificing their spontaneity and zest for life on the altar, more pagan than Christian, of trying to follow the Rule of Life that their superiors insisted was the perfect expression of God's will for them.

No wonder docility was the virtue dearest to the hearts of superiors in those days.

"Keep the Rule," they would say in one of their most addled dicta, "and the Rule will keep you."

Good-hearted young men and women thought these superiors, like the restored professional referees, knew what they were doing when they told them that spiritual perfection lay in following the rules — most of them more like traffic regulations than spiritual insights — that covered almost every waking moment in the lives of seminarians and aspirants to religious orders.

The seminary I attended instructed students with a solemnity unrelieved by irony, "Never appear at the window without your cincture on."

Those who broke any of the rules, mostly by doing something healthy, such as talking to another human being during imposed periods of strict silence, had to report themselves to their superiors. In its most baroque form, this took place at a Chapter of Faults, a public event, in which candidates could accuse themselves, and sometimes others, of rule infractions.

Being a seminarian or a novice in these circumstances was the closest thing to being an innocent bystander at the collision of inhuman but supposedly "perfect" spiritual nonsense with human and reassuringly imperfect common sense.

The so-called "Reform of the Reform" would love to bring back this idea that religion imposes some quest for perfection on us.

That is an illusion akin to the notion that the professional football referees will call every play perfectly.

Instant replay was only introduced when fans, owners and sportswriters complained that the professional referees made too many mistakes in their calls on the field.

The quest for perfection, which has no real application in the spiritual life, calls for a reach that is always beyond our grasp. Even instant replay, through which plays are examined from all angles in slow motion and in freeze-frame, does not always get it right. Continue reading

"If you were to tell them they were a saint they would laugh and tell you to keep searching." If you had the sense and discernment to see the saint next to you- "the ordinary person who perseveres-the little person who serves others-the plain Jane who takes life easily and simply loves people, then you would learn again what true holiness really is."

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Fr Dwight Longenecker is a author, blogger, freelance writer, and editor. Read Longenecker's Blog Standing on my head

Image: The Coming Home Network